Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR) provides you with the transparent, publisher-neutral data and statistics you need to make confident decisions in today’s evolving scholarly publishing landscape, whether you’re submitting your first manuscript or managing a portfolio of thousands of publications.

Quickly understand a journal’s role within and influence upon the global research community by exploring a rich array of citation metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF), alongside descriptive data about a journal’s open access content and contributing authors.

Our network includes:

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11,896 indexed journals

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236 disciplines

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81 countries/regions

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2.3 million articles, reviews and other source items

What sets us apart?

Objectivity

In order to make good decisions, you need information that you can trust. Journal Citation Reports™ is the only journal report of its kind produced by publisher-neutral experts, providing you with unbiased journal statistics trusted by over 9,000 institutions worldwide. JCR journal profiles aggregate publication and citation data sourced from the Web of Science Core Collection™, the world’s original citation index for scientific and scholarly research.

Selectivity

Researching which journals to submit or subscribe to can be time consuming. Each journal profiled in the JCR has met the rigorous impact and quality standards documented in the Web of Science Core Collection™ editorial selection process—only the journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded™ (SCIE) an Social Sciences Citation Index™ (SSCI) are included—so that you can quickly find a list of the most influential journals in the sciences and social sciences.

Quality control

Web of Science™ monitors and excludes journals that demonstrate predatory behavior; journals in the JCR are subject to additional analysis to detect abnormal citation activity. Journals displaying evidence of excessive self-citation and citation stacking are suppressed from the JCR to ensure the integrity of the reports.

Offering you far more than just a number, JCR journal profiles summarize a journal’s place in the network of scholarly communications so that you can make better informed, confident decisions. View the relationship between article and journal citations with visualizations and linked data alongside descriptive open access statistics to understand the relative contribution of open access articles to a journal’s overall volume of content and citations.

Who is the Journal Citation Reports for?

Publishers and editors

Understand how your journals are performing and benchmark them against others in their discipline.

Librarians

Understand which journals are the most important to your institution’s and researchers’ success.

Using the Journal Impact Factor wisely

Web of Science™ does not depend on the Journal Impact Factor™ alone in assessing the usefulness of a journal, and neither should anyone else. The Journal Impact Factor™ should not be used without careful attention to the many phenomena that influence citation rates – for example the average number of references cited in the average article. The Journal Impact Factor™ should be used with informed peer review. In the case of academic evaluation for tenure, it is sometimes inappropriate to use the impact of the source journal to estimate the expected frequency of a recently published article. Again, the Journal Impact Factor™ should be used with informed peer review. Citation frequencies for individual articles are quite varied.

Journal Citation Reports™ now includes more article-level data to provide a clearer understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the article and the journal. This level of transparency allows you to not only see the data, but also see through the data to a more nuanced consideration of journal value.

Resources for publishers

We’ve created a publisher toolkit to support you in responsibly promoting your inclusion in the Journal Citation Reports™ to the research community. To acknowledge your listing in the Journal Citation Reports™, we have created a badge for you to use on your journal website or in your marketing material.